


Fealty

by hedgebitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Due Process in the Wizarding World, Gen, Post-First War with Voldemort, Sirius Black Free from Azkaban, and jk doesnt make that too hard to accomplish!, look basically i saw one plot hole and was like. what if instead it was better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28507899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgebitch/pseuds/hedgebitch
Summary: The fidelius charm is a funny little thing. Short of, say, setting up a team of aurors to go prepare a prisoner for Azkaban, cleaning them of any enchantment short of the unbreakable vow, there really is only one way to end its protection: telling the secret.Or, Sirius is investigated and cleared of charges.
Relationships: Sirius Black & Alice Longbottom, past Sirius Black/Remus Lupin - Relationship
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	Fealty

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this several years ago while i was trying to figure out how the fidelius charm worked and came across a few interesting/infuriating plot points along the way. peter had to have told a lot more people than just voldemort for hagrid to know the location of the house. as a big proponent of legal justice,,,i present to you now this preliminary exploration of a few characters who could have had wildly different storylines

The fidelius charm is a funny little thing. Short of, say, setting up a team of aurors to go prepare a prisoner for Azkaban, cleaning them of any enchantment short of the unbreakable vow, there really is only one way to end its protection: telling the secret.

Say you’ve performed the charm to protect the location of a building—a house. And now you’ve got one person, one person in the entire world, who can tell you where that house is.

And maybe they even do it. Maybe they tell you. But now you’ve got a problem: you can’t tell anyone the secret. You could just keep it to yourself, but where’s the fun in that? How can you show off your newfound knowledge?

You could kill the secret-keeper, sure. They die, and suddenly everyone they ever told becomes a primary secret-keeper in their stead, and then you could run around telling people, willy-nilly. But after going to all that trouble to get them to tell you the secret…well, why throw out a perfectly good informant?

There is only one way to end the protection of the fidelius charm: telling the secret. So you get your secret-keeper nice and ready to squeal, and you don’t let it stop at you. Have them tell every living soul around—have them tell, and tell, and tell, until some unquantifiable threshold breaks and suddenly there is no secret left to protect.

There are so many ways to tell a secret—whisper it in passing, jot down a note, send a letter, hell; you could write it in skywriting. 

But here’s the thing: it has to be the primary secret keeper who tells. No one else can do it; no one else can break the charm.

There’s a universe out there where inexperienced aurors, freshly born into a war and recruited on lower than standard OWLS, don’t know quite enough about the fidelius charm. They arrive at the scene of the crime and arrest the man laughing and surrounded by corpses; eager for the war to end, no one bothers to question the circumstances. A wand is snapped and a prisoner is made.

There’s a different clump of universes out there where one auror, the senior officer on the case, arrives two seconds earlier than the rest of the lot. Or well, spends two seconds fewer staring at the blood soaked concrete canvas.

And within that clump of universes, within those two seconds, there’s a universe where paranoid and confused, Mad-Eye Moody performs Priori Incantato before a junior officer gets the chance to snap Sirius Black’s wand, and determines that for all his duel with Pettigrew seemed to show, Black had not cast the dark mark still hovering above Godric’s Hollow, and could not have been the Potter’s secret keeper.

Black still spends the night in ministry custody. He somehow manages to be both incoherent and uncooperative, though by mid-morning has already begun demanding news of his godson of any auror on duty, even once demanding “my phone call, goddamnit” in a passable American accent.

The Blacks have always had such an unfortunate predilection for madness, and no one in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement has much free time to waste on surprise, or even mild annoyance, not with the abrupt disappearance of Aurors Longbottom and Longbottom weighing rather heavily on the minds of all.

Albus Dumbledore arrives at the ministry looking rather put out around the time all twelve students not yet pulled out of Hogwarts must be eating lunch. Black sobers at his arrival, appears to experience a second lapse in insanity, and consents to legilimency, to pensieve, to veritaserum, to anything that will clear his name.

Legilimency and veritaserum, despite the controversy about their admissibility in court, are still legally considered viable evidence in an investigation, and as such Black’s testimony is regarded as fact. There is very little evidence to prove his innocence, but even less proving his guilt, and several un-Obliviated eyewitness accounts confirming his use of solely his own wand (once Priori Incantato is again performed with Dumbledore as witness and shows neither conjuring nor blasting curse) are enough to clear Sirius of all charges.

Moody looks none-too-happy at this development, looks to not quite believe the story he’s been told, but there’s Death Eaters to catch and curses to end, and Sirius, is, if nothing else, a friend.

Dumbledore uncharacteristically sticks around—Sirius wonders briefly if it’s to offer an apology or a threat, until the bastard shows his hand and it’s neither and both all rolled up into one.

(He wants to protest it, he does. He’s aching to tell the old man, “One, I’m his godfather. Two, I’m a combat-trained wizard. Three, just so we’re clear, ‘godfather’ means I’m the person his parents chose to care for him should anything happen to them. Four, erm, I can fit my whole fist in my—”)

“Sirius?” Albus adds, filling his voice with a pretense of afterthought no sane man could be bothered to believe. “I’m glad you’ve agreed to cooperate with my decisions on Harry’s care. I know how much it must pain you not to follow James and Lily’s wishes, but I think we can both see the sense in this change. I’m sure, were they able to foresee this, your friends would want their son to grow up with family, with a mother and a father, and a child his own age.”

Sirius carries on fuming silently.

“And, in light of your cooperation, and the difficulties you will no doubt face if the reactions of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to your arrest are anything to go by—I think perhaps it will be best for us to take a quick trip to the Animagus Registration Department, where I might be able to offer a bit of credence should you permit me to explain how I requested that you, James, and Peter all undergo Animagus transformations in order to aid the war effort.”

In twenty six hours, the Longbottoms will be found and the Lestranges brought in, and certainly had Sirius still been in custody, things could have gone quite differently. The side-by-side comparison of the two Black cousins, manic and wild and desperate—no observer would ever have let Sirius free.

Sirius takes the visitor’s exit out of the Ministry, scrounges up some change and takes the tube home. He uses the time to think—well, to think as best he can, considering the circumstances, and take stock of what’s left to be dealt with.

He steps off the train with a mental list not unlike the one Remus and Lily wrote up when the latter realized the former would be moving into an apartment with “someone who’s had his fucking shoes tied by servants, _god_ , Remus.”

He’s got: graves to visit—James and Lily, Gideon and Fabian, Marlene and Dorcas, too many others to name. A family crypt to piss on: which is, to say, his own. People to write: Andy, Alice, Remus (not that he’ll read it), and—well that’s actually it. 

Everyone else is gone.

Maybe a thank you note to Moody, he considers, in lieu of fixating on that last point. “Hi! My entire world’s fallen to pieces, but thanks for doing your job and not imprisoning me on sight! Lots of love xoxoxo!”

“Other points, other points,” he mutters to himself as he unlocks his apartment door. He starts checking wards out of habit, then remembers half the death eaters left alive probably think he’s one of them. 

For a split second he thinks he hears movement from the kitchen, thinks he’s about to see Remus poke his head out into the hall, and then he remembers Remus is long gone, has been since—since whenever that last fight was, the one that saw his favourite mug shattered to pieces and Remus off to Merlin-knows-where.

Sirius steadfastly ignores this slip-up in favour of returning to the list at hand: graves, crypt, letters—what else? Right. Godchild. Harry.

And altogether rather quickly, the events of the past few days all sink in at once. 

It occurs to him that if he wants to get custody, he’s going to have to find another job. Does unpaid secret agent even count as a job? It’s not like he can use anyone from the Order as a reference.

And then it strikes him, exactly what kind of job he can do with decent OWLS/NEWTS, three years life experience, and fuck all else, so he begrudgingly adds Albus to the list of people to write.

Twenty six hours after Sirius Black is released from ministry custody, Aurors Frank and Alice Longbottom are found and immediately brought to St. Mungo’s.

In any other universe, it could easily have been longer than twenty six. But in this universe, the Magical Law Enforcement Department is still on high alert for a dangerous Death Eater approximately the size of a rat, and capturing known Death Eaters Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange remains a much higher priority than celebrating the supposed death of Vol—of You Know Who.

The Cruciatus curse can cause permanent damage within minutes. Complete destruction, however, is a long and delicate process. Neither Alice nor Frank Longbottom will ever recover from their torture, but Alice, “lovely little Longbottom,” who Bellatrix saved for last, will have a life left to live while bearing her burden.

Alice comes back to herself slowly. It’s a week before she’s responsive enough to see her son, and a week from then that the nurses are allowed to tell her about Frank, and it’s not til two and a half weeks in to her month long stay at the hospital that she can get her limbs moving in the right order to demand news of current events _or else_.

“Alice, d-dear,” the nurse tries to calm her. “We’re not—not supposed to upset you with any, with any news, and—”

“I’ll upset _you_ if—” is as far as Alice makes it before one of the few Healers making rounds notices she’s stolen her nurse’s wand. Once she’s been sufficiently calmed, the nurse tells her anyways, clearly valuing his life over her speedy recovery. 

The nurse can only tell her as much as he knows, which is only that You Know Who killed Lily and James Potter, but somehow failed to kill their son. When Augusta comes in with Neville on the weekend, she casts silencing spell after silencing spell before relaying to Alice her own version of events—that Sirius Black led You Know Who to the Potters, but managed to talk his way out of Azkaban and into custody talks over their son.

Augusta also brings with her a copy of the Prophet with a self-updating, self-organizing list of the dead, the missing, the wounded. Alice holds it close for the rest of her stay, watches her own name disappear from the “wounded” column and reappear on the depressingly short “found” list as she crosses the threshold of the ward.

She moves into Augusta’s home for the time being, and begins the long and arduous process of deciding who she can safely write to. Despite the strong urge to disregard every word from her mother-in-law’s mouth, Alice moves Sirius Black’s name to the absolute bottom of her list.

(Sirius, meanwhile, has been watching his own copy of the Prophet, with the uncharacteristic patience of someone who has no one left in the world. He’s gotten quill to parchment before the paper can even finish spelling “Longbottom.”)

Alice’s list becomes out of date a few hours after Sirius completes his own list, unwelcome letter and owl making themselves quite at home on Augusta’s kitchen table. She almost throws it out when she recognizes the handwriting, but a rather unorthodox note scrawled onto the envelope reads “Multiplication Charm _will_ go into effect if ignored,” and she wouldn’t put it past Sirius—wouldn’t put much past him at all, at this point.

It’s not the letter that changes things so much as its opening. 

It’s a small ripple, nothing much—but in this one particular universe, choosing to hear a secret can hold just as much power as choosing to tell one.

**Author's Note:**

> i will probably not be writing more of this but i do have a few other hp drafts so feel free to come bug me on tumblr @[barbarawilson](https://barbarawilson.tumblr.com) for additional content


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